tion to conclude the chronicle of the March family "with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield." Once the cause of abolition had been won, Alcott zealously campaigned for wmen's rights. After 1870 she regularly contributed to the feminist Woman's Journal and signed her letters "Yours for Reform." She and her mother both signed a woman suffrage petition on the occasion of the national centennial in 1875, and she vigorously urged the women of Concord to use their new opportunity when they got the right to vote in school committee elections. Even in her juvenile fiction, from Little Women on, she constantly preached the right of girls to develop their talents and pursue careers outside of marriage. Jo admits Naught Nan to her boys' school, and in Jo's Boys Nan becomes a fine physician, as well as an ardent suffragist, and resolutely resists marriage. Alcott repeatedly portrayed groups of contentedly self-sufficient women, such as the young comrades in An Old-Fashioned Girl.Throughout her career, Alcott struggled to reconcile her Transcendentialist conviction that individuals must think independently and be true to themselves with the morality of submission, self-control, and self-sacrifice in which her parents trained her, a morality that was enjoined particularly on women. She sometimes evaded the conflict by preaching the supreme value of womanly, especially maternal, love, in accordance with the contemporary cult of true womanhood. She tried to resolve it by claiming that independence was compatible with traditional womanliness, that a woman can happily divide her energies among ballot box, "needle, pen, palette and broom," and even by insisting that self-denial deepens and authenticates artistic achievement. However, her assertations are less persuasive than her characters who rebel against conventionally defined female goodness. Alcott, however, did not let her resentment surface in behavior: she constantly sacrificed her person...
